Merry Ficmas, 2013!
by KissTheBoy7
Summary: Because I forgot to post this last year, I'm posting it this year. Merry ficmas to my lovely friends. Look out for the 2014 edition, coming soon!
1. Olivia

**Olivia**

It's been several months - almost an entire year - since they've spoken at all.

He still has all of their messages – from first to last, not a single character wasted. He copy-pastes them meticulously from his e-mail and into a Word document that he carries around in a little red USB in his pocket. (because that was _his_ favorite color, most of the time)

Perhaps he's just paranoid, but he can't handle the idea of losing a single word.

It's a hundred bucks and twelve hours on one bus or another, sitting cramped beside strangers, with crying babies and crinkling bags of vending-machine tide-overs that they eat with their mouths open; he clutches his camera in his lap and he watches out the window, ignoring the nausea. He's not sure that it's motion sickness.

It doesn't freeze over like he expected it to. He arrives on a sunny day, albeit cold, ambles up an unfamiliar sidewalk.

Sitting on the step, he takes out his phone and scrolls through the year-old e-mail again, just to be sure. The address is exact. He's at the right place.

Eli probably doesn't remember, but that's okay too.

Maybe it's best that they don't meet, after all…

_I got my acceptance letter today!_

There had been one, and then a flood, and Harvey had slipped gradually to the sidelines, into drugs and clubs and older men. They'd had so many plans together, so much left to learn. He _wants _to know him, but he's not sure he does anymore.

Harvey doesn't have an acceptance letter. He barely has a diploma.

What good was school to _him_, anyways?

Eli, he's a quantifiable genius. He's _brilliant _and beautiful, and perfect, and he'd promised Harvey that one day he'd be the first person to stroke his fingers through his hair and hold his hand and look into his eyes, and he could hear the wedding bells even through the plain text.

He waits until the sun is going down. There's a distinct ache at the tips of his fingers and toes.

The digital clock on his homescreen reads 5:57.

"You're a little early," teasing, and that's a voice he hasn't heard in a _while_, and never quite this close, and – Harvey's head shoots up and there he is, everything, the very center of his gravity –

Tears are welling up faster than he can restrain them.

_Sap._

"I didn't want to miss you," he hears from his own mouth, a frosty cloud, but there is a hand over his and it's warmer than the sun could ever be, and Eli beams brighter than he'd ever imagined was possible in his darkening world.

"I really missed you," he says, sincere, and curls his fingers possessively around his.

Harvey flushes.

"Yeah. Me too."

"I love you," he reminds him, leaning closer with that same shy bat of his eyes. Some things never change.

"Me too," he chokes out again, and rests their foreheads together. Eli's hair is dark, damp, dusted with white.

It's beginning to snow.


	2. Chandler

**Chandler**

Sometimes Mark looks at his best friend and sees the same greasy-haired kid he'd met eight years ago.

When he'd first come to the city, when he'd done the first stupid thing he'd ever done in his _life _and told his dad to fuck off, he didn't need his money, he didn't need a stupid _degree _when he had a camera and a dream, it was like Roger had been waiting for him. Some fairytale prince, just lounging in his eighth story palace with the broken skylight, staring down at the people like ants below and flicking ash from the edge of his royal cigarette.

Their shoulders collided on the sidewalk and Roger had whipped around and snarled at him to _watch where you're going_ and Mark hadn't cowered, for once, just stared at him like he'd found God on his way back to his hotel.

Roger was everything. Roger was exactly who he wanted to be. Roger had a guitar and an apartment with some crazy guy who worked at NYU, and a smile like a wolf, and Mark was Little Red Riding Hood with a camera for a basket, ready and willing to be eaten for love.

They were eighteen, they were stupid. They thought they could do anything.

April had proven both of them wrong.

Mark loved Roger like nobody else would, or could, or wanted to. Mark was Roger's saving grace this time around.

He shakes and cries and screams and punches the walls and stomps on the floor and breaks down and slams doors and shatters the glass in the windows so many times Collins stops replacing it. But sometimes Mark looks at him, and he sees beneath his skin and into his heart and time stops and Mark knows exactly what love is like.

Love is Roger Davis.

Love is Roger, eyes no longer rimmed with kohl, staring blankly out the window with is arms curled around his knees.

Love is Roger with his watery smile, sarcastic and diluted.

Love is the smack Roger lands to the side of his head when he won't stop doting on him for three seconds, and _get out of my fucking face, Mark._

Love is Roger, voice raw and hoarse from screaming, whispering to him to s_tay, please._

Love is Roger before all of this, and during, and whoever he will be afterwards.

Love is Roger's chipped nail polish and greasy hair and cigarette-stale breath in the morning and Mark _knows _he's been up smoking in the middle of the night again, but at least he'd come back to bed this time to tangle his limbs with Mark and press close and just breathe until the tears wouldn't come anymore.

So sometimes, Mark takes a Sharpie and he writes over every single one of those track marks, until there's nothing left but him, and them, and love.


	3. Miki

**Miki**

Mark finds out about Roger's roots completely by accident.

They're talking about something completely inane one night – some Animal Planet special, on deep sea creatures – and Roger spits the word _octopus _like a curse, and his accent slips.

Mark stares at him for a long moment before he starts to laugh.

"What was that?" Roger is dark red, his eyes narrowed in warning, but Mark had learned to disregard His Pompousness long ago. Roger's bark was worse than his bite.

"Shut up," Roger snaps, swiping at the camera cradled like a baby in his lap where he'd been fiddling with it. He shifts out of reach, grinning impishly. "Fuck off, I'm tired –"

Mark Cohen could be a nuisance, too.

"What are you, _Scottish?" _He snorts, but Roger is still giving him that dark look and he has to restrain his laughter. "Oh my God."

"It's _British. _Get it right." He scowls, shoving himself to his feet. "I'm going to bed."

"You're _British?" _This time Mark can't quite get a handle on himself before he's gasping for breath, laughing so hard his lungs burn. He's sure that Collins can probably hear him, wherever he is right now, and is mentally laughing along with him. "Say it again – come on, please?"

"Stop mocking my heritage for your amusement!"

"You mock my heritage all the time!"

"You're Jewish!" He crossed his arms, nearly pouting.

"But you're _British." _Mark bites his lips to keep them from twitching, widening his eyes innocently. "One more time."

"I'm not – come on, Mark!" There's a slight whine to his voice. Mark is pretty sure this can't get any funnier. "It took me for fucking ever to get rid of it."

"Why? Come on," he wheedles, scooting closer and reaching for his wrist. "At least explain."

Roger is silent for a moment, brooding, but Mark's touch is a surefire way to relax him. He falls gracelessly back beside him and leans his head on his shoulder. _Pouting. _Mark bites his lip again. "I grew up in London, okay? Until I was eight."

"Is that supposed to be embarrassing? Roger, I grew up in _Scarsdale."_

"Point taken." He sighs dramatically, nuzzling into Mark's neck. The filmmaker felt the heat creeping into his cheeks before Roger's hand even made it to his thigh. "So… since you made me relive my traumatic past –"

"Roger, Collins is home –"

"Now you have to repay me."

"Roger!"

Roger looked up from his lap, grinning around the zipper between his teeth, and Mark decided that Collins would just have to take the hint.


	4. Chelsea

**Chelsea**

There are a lot of reasons that people fall in love with Maureen – and at some point, everyone does – but for Mark, it's her fingers.

Not in a cutesy, dainty way. Not even in an I-want-to-hold-your-hand way, because he's prone to sweaty palms and that's just not sexy, so they don't hold hands often or at all, really.

Mark loves Maureen, but he loves her fingers most.

And God, he misses them.

People wonder sometimes how anyone could stay with her for as long as he had, but Mark knows – he's felt her pressed deep inside of him, curving and stroking and whispering sweet, deadly words of encouragement until he was sobbing and near-passed out, nails ripping holes in the threadbare sheets.

He loves Maureen, he loves her fingers, and he loves her collection, too.

(He tries not to think about where most of them have been, because Mark tries not to think about sex very much at all.)

(Because he has an unfortunate tendency to – well. He'd rather not explain.)

From the second she manages to wrangle him in the bedroom, he knows he's hooked. And he thinks for about half a minute that he's going to be ashamed of this later, until she's on top of him and kissing him and stroking him and reaching _inside _of him like no one had ever explained to him was even possible, and he was gasping her name and he was done for.

There was no escape. She had him wrapped around her little finger. (and the rest of them, too.)

And he knows that this isn't the only way to love someone, or the only reason – there are plenty of other things about Maureen that he loves, or learns to, anyways. Her luminous eyes. Her curvy body. The way she throws her head back when she laughs. His gut twists with guilt every time he goes back to her, though, because it's always the same reason.

Even after the fiasco with April, and their breakup(s), and even _well_ after Joanne came into the picture, he goes to her time and again.

He always finds her waiting with that twist of a smirk, a simpering crooked finger, and a bottle of lube resting innocently on the bed beside…

Oh.

_Yes, please._

So yeah, he feels guilty – but it's hard to speak with your wrists tied over your head and seven inches of rubber up your ass, and Mark is pretty sure that even if he _could _form coherent sentences right now, he wouldn't.

She always lets him come back, doesn't she? At least he's getting laid. At least she hasn't left him, really, even if she says she has.

He loves her. He'll always love her.

Let them laugh – he knows that she loves him, too.


	5. Ricky

**Ricky**

Long before she steps into the light, Angel begins planning.

Lying limp with pain in her hospital bed, surrounded by all of her friends and always by Collins, who loved her more than anyone ever had in her life, she knew that this could not be how she repaid him for that. Tom had given her life and love, and reminded her of what it was to be really _happy – _to be alive.

She couldn't stay alive forever; but she could still be there for him.

His sobs as she felt herself slipping from her body were the final push. She returned, mere hours later, to watch him cry into Mark's arms like a child.

_It's my turn, _she had whispered to him, and gently smoothed her hands down over his sides. Although he couldn't feel her, he must have felt _something – _the goosebumps she left in delicate trails were testament to that, and the way his breath hitched, his eyes fluttering.

"She didn't deserve it," he's saying desperately, and Mark nods tightly in agreement, pale and sick. She can see Roger in his eyes and makes a mental note to pay April a visit, if she's still around.

But that comes later.

For now, Tom needed her more than anyone.

So she learns not to try and put herself everywhere at once, as she'd done in her lifetime, and to let Tom be the center of her attentions.

There was only so much she could do, like this – only touches, little drafts of warmth, a squeeze when he needs it most. At first she's weak, but with the weeks that follow, the months, she begins to get a handle on this whole 'ghost' thing. Her drumsticks lie on the nightstand, never allowed to gather any dust, and she has to force herself not to touch them.

Somehow, a year passes. And Collins still hasn't forgotten her.

He talks to her. They have entire one-sided conversations together – about everything from his job to the guy eying him from across the food court, who was either a cop or just interested and either way it puts him on guard, and about Mark and Roger and their _thing _and about Maureen and Joanne's second attempt at a wedding…

Angel listens and aches, because he hasn't forgotten her, but he's got to move on – and she does, too.

It hurts to stay. It takes so much out of her, when she should be resting…

On Christmas Eve, she takes up the drumsticks – with some tremendous effort, with the very last dregs of her energy – and, as Collins slips into lonely dreams, raps softly on the nightstand the melody of her love for him. He listens hazily and smiles, murmuring her name.

"Angel…"

_I love you too, _she sighs, and lets them clatter back to the floor. She can feel herself fading.

God, she loves him. He must know that by now.

And maybe with her blessing, (and her with his), they both can bear these final years apart…


	6. Emma

**Emma**

Roger learns to knit for Mark, and if that isn't commitment he doesn't know what is.

It takes… fuck, a lot of practice. But there's nothing else to do in that stupid, awful rehab center where Collins _isn't _and Mark _isn't _and it's all wearing on him real fuckin' fast. He isn't allowed to do anything – no guitar for him to play, no chicks for him to moon over, memorize.

No green eyes staring at him hazily in the dark. No blue eyes peering anxiously at him in the morning.

No coffee, either.

This fucking sucks.

He _is _allowed to do this, though. _Art therapy, _they call it, and it's stupid, and he thinks to himself that if he's allowed to fucking fingerpaint then he should be allowed to have his _guitar _or at least his notebook. They've given him a new notebook but it's not the same, and they'd probably read it, miserable bastards.

He swallows his pills and eats the smallest amount he can get away with, and broods in his room for the maximum amount of time every day.

But they're not like Mark, here – they don't indulge him his fits, his sulking. They drag him out back into the world to face dozens of other emaciated, stringy-haired addicts like he's _one of them _or something and they all stare back at him with eyes like lamps, baggy beneath and luminous with fever, with hunger.

He won't pretend he can't feel that, too.

So they give him yarn and they give him some needles (ha, ha) and a woman sits down with him and plasters on a kind smile that he just wants to rip off of her face. And she puts her hands over his – _don't touch me – _and she shows him what to do.

He tells her it's stupid. This whole thing is stupid.

She tells him, slyly, that if he gets good enough at it, then maybe they'll let him have a visitor this week.

Since he's shit at everything else they want him to do (but they want him to do the impossible, which is get better, forget her) and all he can think about lately is Mark, Mark and his blue eyes, Mark and his lotion-soft hands and his voice cracking with embarrassment and his glasses sliding down his nose, Mark who holds him at night when he needs it and who lets him kiss him sometimes and never says a word about it in the morning… he figures, he might as well give it a try.

So he knits, and he sucks at it, but there's always Mark in the front of his mind with cheeks rosy from the cold. (it's thawing now but that's how he remembers him last)

Come Saturday there's a scarf in his hands, blue and white striped like something hideous straight out of Mark's vastly uncool wardrobe and actually manages to smile a little bit down at it, because even if it was a piece of shit, it was worth it.

Mark throws his arms around him, and his cheeks are still just as red as he remembers them being, and he tells him fiercely that he loves it.

_Yeah, love you too,_ Roger thinks dazedly to himself.

He goes home the next Thursday and decides never to leave again.


	7. Michelle

**Michelle**

In the year that he's away, Anatoly gets to thinking about all of the things in his life that he'd been taking for granted.

Florence is as easy to live with as he'd anticipated. A bit… too easy, actually. As things settle down and the press stop knocking at their door at all hours of the day and night, and it's safe for them to leave the flat for groceries and trips to the wash in the building's basement, he begins to see an unsettling pattern in their relationship.

The sex is perfectly good. Fantastic, actually, which he thinks is what got them to this point in the first place. They work well together, physically and mentally. Florence lives the life of a chessman – she makes coffee in the morning, she studies his every movement. He appreciates more than he could put into words the subtle movements of her eyes, the way she bites her lip when she's picking apart something he's said, some subtext even he couldn't read.

They split the housework up evenly – he does the dishes, she does the laundry, and so on. They stay up talking well into the night, occasionally tipsy and oftentimes lapsing into gasps and desperate pants as they move together.

This is everything that he'd missed in his marriage, but now he's missing something else.

Florence doesn't love him.

He's mostly sure that he doesn't love her, either.

He doesn't know how this happened. Had they loved each other to begin with? On closer examination, probably not. It had been days – perhaps a week. They'd known each other a week, and suddenly they were living together. Freddie Trumper was nowhere to be seen.

They don't love each other – they're just convenient for each other.

Once he comes to that realization, it's smooth sailing once more. After all, there's no need to upset the balance of things. They were both getting something out of it – call it a mutually beneficial alliance, call it anything you want. He was happy. She was happy.

Freddie Trumper wasn't happy. His wife wasn't happy.

His children weren't happy.

It was two to four – that should have spoken for itself, but he makes excuses in his mind. _They're young – in a few years they won't remember you, _and _they like their mother more. _All of them are feeble, and all of them make him cringe.

The months start to drag on. He tries to be happy, he really does – Florence tries to _make _him happy. She tries so hard they both end up exhausted and moody, and Florence puts twice as much sugar in her coffee in the morning like she's thinking of Freddie Trumper again, and Anatoly looks furtively about when he's sure she's out and picks up the phone and dials the extension.

They don't speak often. Svetlana rarely says a word before handing the phone to one or the other; Anatoly listens to their tiny, excited voices and steers the conversation clear of _when are you coming home?_

He's not sure he's ever coming home, but even that is an improvement.

At Christmas – Russian Christmas, anyways, Rozhdestvom – he sends a card and a small gift for each of them – extravagant dolls with velvet dresses and large, glassy eyes that make him uncomfortable just looking at them.

Florence idly offers to write something in the card, out of politeness. Looking at her is almost as bad. The guilt is eating him alive.

It takes the interview at Bangkok to make the decision for him, and by then, he's so attached to Florence and the simple, synced way they live their life together that he makes a martyr of himself in the process. But she has to understand – they all have to understand. He could never live with the guilt, if he hadn't gone back.

He'll be home for Christmas this year.

Maybe someday he'll even forgive himself.


	8. Flo

**Emily**

Once upon a time there was a princess named Florence, who lived in the highest room of the tallest tower of a ridiculously easy-to-climb building in Manhattan.

She was the lost princess of a land far, far away – across the ocean and across borders that she thought, frankly, were a little bit arbitrary; boys came to her, young and arrogant princes, from all over Manhattan from the time she was young to the present, at seventeen. They scaled her tower and peeked into her window while she was changing, leering. Some chose even to brave the twin dragons who guarded her home, but all were turned away at the door.

They brought her gifts, often flowers and ribbons and other such nonsense.

Florence did not have the patience for teenaged boys, however, nor for love. She had better things to do – polishing her nails, for example, and writing papers for the local university. To be married would be an awful waste of her time, and childbearing even worse.

One night, however, when she was letting her hair down for the day with her blinds drawn carefully shut, there came a knock at her window; that in itself was not unusual, but for once, there were no suitors for her to push to their deaths when she flung the window open.

There was, however, a note.

She stared at the small envelope warily for a minute, and when it was apparent that there were no tricks to this, reached out carefully to the ledge to grasp it. It was very thin, for a love letter, and she almost doubted that there was anything inside.

There was, in fact, a single slip of paper. It read:

_White pawn to A4_

Florence blinked down incredulously and glanced once more at the window, where the curtains billowed innocently. There was not a soul in sight. She couldn't fathom who might have left her such a note. Still, there was a table set up in the corner; she read the note twice more, searching for some hidden clue or perhaps traces of invisible ink, before wandering to the set and moving the white pawn to the designated square.

Nothing happened.

She stared at it for so long, with such intensity, that she felt a little foolish. Her fingers danced over the heads of the black pieces – she slid a pawn forward by one square and turned the scrap of paper over, searching for a pen. Her cursive was neat and tidy in comparison to the scrawl on the front.

_Black pawn to B6_

Glancing about furtively, she slid the paper back into the envelope and sealed it shut with a sticker from her desk, setting back on the ledge outside her window. To be sure it would not blow away she placed a small paperweight atop it.

She went to bed with a strange feeling of excitement stirring in the pits of her stomach.

The next morning she woke in jittery anticipation and went to the window, still dressed only in her nightgown; it was a risk she was willing to take, in her impatience. The envelope was exactly as she had left it, trapped beneath the paperweight; she frowned, disappointment twisting in her throat, but before she could shut the window again a small tear in the envelope's exterior caught her eye.

Hastily, she leaned out to retrieve it, heart skipping when she peeked inside and saw that there was another scrap of paper to join the first. The familiar scrawl returned; she imagined a cheeky smile on a stranger's face, accompanying it.

_Knight to F3_

_your move princess._

She couldn't bring herself to be upset by the lack of proper punctuation, so relieved she was to see that her mysterious friend had returned. This interested her much more than talk of princes and marriage, or hand-holding, or even of the complex economical concepts that she wrote of in her school papers. To have a friend was her only wish, and one that had gone so long neglected that she had almost forgotten it.

With the morning breeze stirring her hair, still in a bird's nest from that night's fitful dreaming, she fumbled for her favorite pen and scratched out a reply in her neat script. She set the envelope carefully back beneath the paperweight, biting her lip before she had to part with it. Her hands were slow and unwilling as they closed the window once more and drew the curtains, so that none of her suitors might glimpse her naked.

Florence went about her day, only half-aware of her surroundings. (which always remained the same) By nightfall she had pondered all that she could ponder; she checked the envelope several times throughout the day, but she had yet to receive a reply.

She was beginning to think that her faceless friend had abandoned her.

But her patience, however thin it had grown, was to be rewarded; shortly before bed that evening, with the stars glimmering brightly above, there was a quick tapping at her window. She flung it open in excitement, only to be met with a pig-nosed boy, smiling at her sultrily.

"Hey, princess –"

"Oh, get away – I am not looking for _you." _She gave him a hard shove and watched his eyes widen as he lost his grip, falling the short distance to the bushes beneath her window. His whimpering grated on her nerves; she checked for the envelope, and lo and behold, she had her reply.

"Thank you," she whispered to no one, and the moon smiled kindly in return.

For weeks it continued that way; every morning and every night, there would be another move to make, another note from her fast friend, who went simply by a small symbol of a crown, minutely detailed. She laughed when her friend told her, sarcastically, to call them 'Your Majesty' – she had a feeling that they had no interest in her royalty at all, for princes all wanted the same things from her.

This person, whoever they were, was not after her virginity (which she saw no use for, anyways) or her hand, but rather, her mind.

If they had been after her heart, they would have been sorely disappointed. Florence had been told countless times that she did not have a heart; that she was cold, indifferent, and withered where other girls were lush and smiled prettily as they allowed themselves to be wooed. She certainly didn't believe herself to be cold, nor indifferent, but there was something that she felt she couldn't identify with in all of these lovely fairy tales. Some element that she would never empathize with, nor did she really want to.

Their letters became longer and longer as the game progressed, and Florence grew to fear the end of it. It was irrational, but some part of her believed that perhaps _all _that her friend was interested in was her mind – despite their queries, endless and fascinated, of her life, her thoughts, her dreams, she wondered (perhaps paranoid) if the stranger might beat her, that they would lose interest and find some other scholar to write to.

As such, she threw herself into the task of winning; in every spare moment, between assignments and composition of letters, she thought intensely of the war raging on the board at the corner of her room.

Her friend seemed to sense the tension in her mind. One night, with only five pieces left on the board, they inquired about the state of her health. The question seemed almost worried; the ink was smudged, having barely dried before she had retrieved the note but she forced herself not to peer out the window in search, for it was clear that her friend did not want to be seen. She sighed, and wrote back in half-truths.

_I am feeling a bit under the weather, but I assure you, it is no serious malady._

The window was shut once more, and she had barely crossed the room when she heard the sound of scraping shoes; she froze, hardly daring to breathe, and when the knock sounded she flung herself across the room in her excitement. Her friend was only a dark shape ducking around the corner, but still, it gave more form to them than words on a page. They had never returned twice in one night before – she stared out, almost longing, before looking down at the scribble before her. It was messier than usual.

_Sickness of the mind is the most dangerous, milady._

She wrinkled her nose, glaring halfheartedly at the site of the shape's disappearance. _Milady. _Someone was feeling sardonic tonight. She took her pen from it's place beside the windowsill and wrote out a careful reply.

_Are you questioning my sanity? How rude._

_Aren't you going to make your move? Or is this your way of forfeiting your crown?_

The next reply was even swifter than the first, and as forcedly casual as it was, every smeared word rang with urgency. Florence fought a smile as she read.

_you'd be the first to beat me_

_I'm distracted_

_give me a break_

This time, the shadow lingered, watching back at her; she wished that there were a light that she could turn on and banish the darkness so that she could finally look upon the face of her dearest friend in the world.

_You're stalling._

_Distracted by what. Me? Flattery will get you nowhere._

The temptation to wait, to peer between the curtains and catch a glimpse of her friend, was great but she resisted; she turned to her bed and waited, arms crossed and heart hot in her chest, the adrenaline buzzing in her veins similar to that of reading a good book – one about adventures, of magical friends, of swordfights and impossible odds. There seemed so much at stake, tonight; she had a paper due tomorrow, but there was no time to think of it now, only of her friend whose hurried scribbling she could hear with her ears pricked so.

With her hands miraculously steady, she opened the envelope and slid out the note. It read, simply:

_liar_

_could I meet you?_

"Yes," she called down without thinking, and cursed herself as it rang in the cooling night air. The desk click read 3:46 – she should be in bed, or studying at the very least, and now she had probably scared her fabled friend away for good.

"Only if you want –" she began anxiously, but the shape was moving swiftly toward the base of the building again, scaling the wall nimbly. She stepped back from the sill in alarm, hand pressed to her chest, staring as a shaggy head emerged. Blue eyes gleamed back at her in the candlelight, nervously; the nose and mouth remained below the sill, still a mystery.

"…Bishop A5. Check."

It was a deeper voice than she had expected; she blinked, belatedly nodding, and felt a smile begin to bloom across her face. She extended her hand.

"Come in. It's cold," she invited, and after a moment the boy bobbed his head in agreement, taking her hand in his and allowing her to help him up and inside. He was dressed in dirty jeans and a white t-shirt, evidently not nearly as well-off as herself. She paused when she realized that she was looking him up and down, narrowing her eyes at his raised eyebrow. He snorted, amused.

"Aren't you going to make your move, princess?" He tightened his hand around hers, however, as though sure that she would flee if he let go. She closed her other around it, squeezing reassuringly. He was taller than she had anticipated and she had to look up to meet his eyes.

"There's plenty of time for that." She had a feeling that it would be a long time before they would separate again, if at all. "Won't you stay a while?"

He dropped his pretenses, looking at her with shining eyes – _oh, no. _"You want me to?"

There was no way to backtrack now. Her gut twisted uneasily. "W-what's your name?" Perhaps she could distract him while she thought of what to do, what to say. How to let him down, after all of this time. She should have known.

"Freddie," he supplied readily, gnawing his lip. He took note of the faint twist in her expression, grimacing. "… What'd I do? I can't have pissed you off already –"

"Freddie," she began slowly. "Freddie, if you're looking for… for something… you know…"

He shakes his head vigorously, eagerly. "No – please. I just want to be here. Please, let me stay."

"But Freddie…"

Love was not something that Florence knew how to handle, not without a sigh and a shove and a slam of her window. She couldn't give it back to him, not in the way that he must be hoping; she didn't even know if she could accept it from him in the first place.

Freddie's eyes gleamed. "I swear, I won't bother you."

She didn't want him to leave, not really. Not yet. (not ever) It was too bitter a pill to swallow – just when she had found a friend! Was there no one who could be content with friendship? With reading, and chess and simple touching, with kind words and banter?

Freddie, though, had been content with all of those things… There was no reason to assume that he would ask for more, now.

Her fingers tightened painfully around his. "I doubt that," she murmured, but she was beginning to smile again.

He positively beamed, and shook himself loose to turn and look for the chessboard. "What do you say we finish this game?"

She won, in the end, and he pouted for the rest of the night to her great amusement; in the morning she awoke twined with him in bed, warm and more comfortable than she had ever been sleeping alone, and found that she didn't mind. In the coming months he would kiss her, sometimes, lazily and on the mouth or the shoulder or her navel, (or sometimes even lower…) and with her fingers twisted in his hair, she told him that she loved him very much, and in a sense it was true.

Perhaps love in the sense she'd been imagining wasn't really necessary, in the grand scheme of things.

She had found her partner anyways.


	9. Mary

**Mary**

It's kind of a wonder that they've managed not to kill each other for this long.

Molokov had had a lot of pretty words to say on the subject, but what it had boiled down to was _suck it up and you'll both get what you want._

That was over a week ago.

Freddie wants to tear his hair out.

It's not even that he hates her – _God, he should hate her – _but that he… doesn't. It's frustrating. It's awful.

They pretend when they're in public. They touch, just gently, hinting – once he dares to turn around and cup her jaw and kiss her like he used to do to Florence, mostly just to see the way her nostrils flared indignantly afterwards.

Anatoly watches in disbelief. Florence makes herself conspicuously scarce.

The tournament should be the first thing on Freddie's mind, but chess has stopped meaning tournaments for him and started meaning people – Florence is no longer the queen, though, and he doesn't know how to deal with that. Molokov remains the bishop; Anatoly remains the king; but what is he? And what is she, exactly?

They retreat to their room and Freddie reaches up from the floor to fumble for his pillow, uncomfortably silent in the darkness.

He's supposed to hate her. He doesn't understand.

She doesn't speak at all, when they're alone. She doesn't look at him…

But he looks at her.

He stares at the ceiling and feels her lips against his, a phantom press.

The tournament should be the first thing on his mind; _Florence _should be the first thing on his mind, recapturing the queen.

But instead it's Svetlana.

The bed dips with Freddie's weight. Svetlana raises her pretty blonde head, in question or in threat – he lies carefully beside her, focusing on the sound of her breathing.

He'd never much liked women. Svetlana, though, was like no woman he had ever met.

Another silent moment passes between them, an understanding. They're alike, in a way he's never experienced – she plays the game as well as he does, if not on the board. She's got her children at home, her little princesses, and she'll protect them with her life.

It's all a ploy, he knows it's supposed to be – but that's not what it feels like anymore.

What it feels like is her hand sliding up his bicep, soft and steady.

They don't say anything. They don't have to.

In the morning he will kiss her the moment they leave the room, and there will be no one there to see it, but it's okay, because they're in public – it's okay, because someone _might _see it, so it's not like it's just between the two of them.

It's not like it's real, or anything.


	10. Kris

**Kris**

Every year now, around Christmas, Mark waits for the rattling to begin.

It sounds alarmingly like A Christmas Story, and the first few years had been hell on his nerves. Living alone in itself was just _bad _for him, and even with Collins' monthly visits, things were lonely in the loft with only Mark left to inhabit it.

So the first time it happens, naturally, Mark is pretty fucking creeped out.

The rattling starts at nine and continues into the early morning, disappearing only with the first weak rays of pink light. Mark makes himself a strong pot of coffee and sits in the corner, staring about him twitchily for the next three days until Collins finds him and goes about the lengthy process of 'checking for ghosts.'

He sends him to bed, and Mark dreams of Roger's arms around him again.

It happens every year, like clockwork – and every year he feels it coming closer to him. It doesn't really sound like chains anymore, not the big clanky kind, anyways. It sounds like the chains Roger always wore on his jeans, the scrape of his boots on the wood floor. It sounds like Roger's coughs muffled into his hand so Mark won't hear them and drag him down to the clinic.

Every year it sounds a little more like Roger, and every year he gets a little less afraid.

Collins takes it as a sign of improvement, but truthfully, his mental state is just as bad as it ever was. He still cries when he looks at the tub; he still can't bring himself to clean out Roger's room, not even when his box of old film starts spilling over and it starts looking like he's going to need a storage space if he wants to keep them all. The loft is cluttered yet immaculate, all the time, and on Christmas Eve the rattling brings him peace of mind.

Mark is afraid of almost everything, but he isn't afraid of the rattling at night – because at least it means that Roger is home for Christmas.


	11. Avery

**Amber**

As a child, Freddie wished that he could be like the cat that slipped out the back door every time his parents started shouting.

They never stopped, really. Just one long, continuous stream of cursing and shouting and glass shattering, the whole house shaking with the force of his father's voice, his fists slammed down on the table and then into the wall, and then blossoming into open palms to connect with his mother's face.

It rings in his ears for the rest of his life. Every word that broke his heart, every stinging blow that he couldn't have stopped if he tried.

The cat wasn't his. The cat was a stray and probably had worms. It was emaciated most of the time, even though he shared every scrap of food he could with it – they lived in a first story apartment in the Bronx, and the cat door had been unscrewed and stolen more than once, so they left it that way, a gaping hole in the wood, and let him come and go as he pleased.

Freddie's father hated that cat, but he was never quite fast enough to catch it.

That's probably what it was, in hindsight.

(Fuck hindsight.)

When he's twelve and alone, and scared, with nothing to listen to but his parents' shouting he curls up tightly and tucks his face beneath his hands and pretends that he is laying his ears back in warning; he arches his back when the door opens, bares his teeth. His father takes one look at him and calls him a freak.

He tells him he's leaving, so he'd better take his last look at him. Freddie presses his hands to his eyes and waits until he hears his footsteps fade.

The front door slams shut.

Through the back door, he hears the skittering of untrimmed claws on the floor.

There's nothing he can do; nothing, nothing, nothing he can do but let him leave, and wish and want and hope to God (if there is one, he's never really been sure) that no one will come looking for him. No one but the stupid cat, rubbing up against him and purring like a broken motor, like the only thing in the world that had ever loved him.

Freddie peered at it through his tears, stroking shaky fingers through it's fur, and wondered.

Maybe someday…


	12. Jamie

**Katie**

Freddie doesn't ever really plan on staying in Bangkok until his flight leaves without him, and he can't find it in him to be sorry about that.

He has nothing left to go back to. Not Florence, not Anatoly (and why had he ever considered that a viable option, anyways?) not even his cat which has probably found another home by now, since he hasn't been around to fill it's water dish in weeks now.

He has _nothing._

He wanders aimlessly, blending into the crowd in a daze. They don't part for him; he's no royalty now, only another person, another nameless body moving in rhythm under the lantern's glow.

Bangkok sucks him beneath the streets and into the shadows with little effort. Freddie doesn't bother resisting.

Which is how he finds himself kneeling in front of a man in a dark suit and tie, some American guy with a mouth on him and a wad of bills pressed into his hand. He's not one of _those, _but before he can tell him that, before he can protest he remembers that he hasn't eaten today and he's running low on funds. And, well, it's not like he's straight…

He spends two out of the twenty on a can of Pepsi from the nearest vending machine, knees dirty, hair irreparably messy. No one seems to notice.

It keeps happening that way, the next night and the one after that. Sometimes more than once a night; he wonders if he's getting a reputation, and then if he should be worried about that, or about his own behavior. Sucking people's dicks for cash every night isn't exactly ideal. He's not making enough – he needs to eat more than a Whopper every once in a while. The grease coating his stomach right now is enough to make him sick.

So he makes some friends. They're mostly Thai kids younger than him, by ten years or twenty, but they know the tricks of the trade. One of them, Daeng, invites Freddie to live with him in a two-bedroom apartment in one of the shiftiest parts of the city he's ever been in, but he has no place else to go except the hotel, which sucks more money than he can manage in one night.

His friends are pretty okay kids, once he gets over the fact that they're all young enough to _be _his kids. They've got tips for him, and white powder that they split evenly between themselves and snort in public bathrooms and back alleys, and Freddie is sure he's never felt this good in his entire life.

Bangkok is a filthy tourist attraction. Bangkok is filthy, period.

Freddie Trumper is filthier.

It takes a few weeks before he starts to notice it – the shaking, which starts in his fingers and toes and travels along the network of lines that make up his veins. The shaking gets to his stomach, makes him sick, and then his heart, which feels like it might burst out of him. He sobs and clutches at the rim of the toilet bowl, heaving, hating himself.

All of a sudden, he misses New York.

But what would New York even be to him now? It wouldn't be his apartment and Florence and chess matches on Saturdays, coffee in the mornings. It would be just the same as here – just men with different faces, just powder with a different taste to it.

It would still be throwing up to the tune of his own self-destruction.

So he spits and gags and when Daeng finds him, pityingly, and helps to slide the needle into his vein, he doesn't bother to resist.

He's going to die out here, anyways.


End file.
